What a Mess
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My wife got the phone call at just after 6 AM, and knew as soon as she saw the caller’s name what it must be about at this hour. Never not bad news, unless it’s a drunk! “Dad died about an hour ago…” He had been declining for some time, but this was still a shock.
We knew that we had to race to Kakheti for the funeral, current conditions notwithstanding. But while we packed and settled affairs, we also had to wait until 9 to call the 144 hotline and find out if our trip would even be legal. Yes, they said, as long as we circled the quarantined cities, such as Kutaisi and Tbilisi, which lay in our path. No problem, and off we set.
I had been wondering if we could arrive before the curfew of 9 pm kicked in, but this fear was quite unfounded. In Zugdidi, I drove through the open McDonald’s line, had a quick stop to wolf it down, and we continued. The roads were nice and free; of four checkpoints, only the last one, already in Kakheti, actually stopped us to check our temperatures. We made the 600 km in about 9 hours.
The east-west Georgia crossing pass of 60 km was slower and more clogged than I’d thought it would be, but this was our only bottleneck, the highways’ finished parts making up for lost time dramatically. Through that pass, I had plenty of time to see how Chinese-Georgian progress is going on the huge engineering project of extending this highway through this most challenging part. My last trip through was in December, and they haven’t been wasting time since.
The sheer scale of the thing boggles the mind. Enormous ramps, deforestation and land moved where needed, new bridges. Double tunnel mouths in such bewildering locations and orientations that I can only ask myself: by what Escher/Moebius/Mandelbrot tricks of fractal dimension will they even be connected, in ways which do not mock the laws of time and space and send the hapless driver to other universes, let alone other galaxies of our own? It seems utterly chaotic at the moment, but I’m equally sure that, months or years and billions of currency units later, it will all be sorted out and result in nice smooth driving through neckless bottles for us all. We’re not wasting all this time and money, are we? No, indeed, we have planned much too carefully for that.
Which turns out to be a nice metaphor for the situation I see the whole planet in at the moment. The confusion is growing, even among and inside the most developed and educated nations, over this Virus thing and what to do. News reports of such astounding polarity are jamming the airwaves, the pages real and virtual, that I hardly know what or whom to believe at all anymore. The feeling grows in me that the most powerful nation in the world, with whom we must all sink or swim, has placed Freedom on its main pedestal of godhood, above all else, no matter the risk to life. Medical and scientific reports soberly contradict each other; people apparently of great importance lie and accuse each other of lying, or at least untruth (what’s the difference?), but don’t bother to sue each other for libel. It looks to be all going to Hell.
The other metaphor I saw along the way was a set of roadside trees which were in the process of being choked to death by a slow but seemingly inexorable parasitic creeper, covering them from ground to crown. It was horribly ugly and chaotic, one of the examples in nature of a life form which I would rather not see at all, would rather didn’t exist. I suppose it has its place in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t see this, and its presence disturbs me.
And then I remember and return to what I consider to be the bedrock of truth, my faith. If someone says “There are no absolutes,” I reply, “Absolutely?” I don’t peer into Scripture and see how this will all play out, to the last detail. But I can accept that this life is less than a drop in the timeless ocean of eternity, at once a joke to be laughed at from the perspective of there and a time of deadly significance in determining what “there” there will be; while “that there” turns back and reflects on “this here” at the same time, infecting our mote with the infinite significance of our… choices. I don’t have children to inherit my property? So what? In the end it won’t matter, either to me or to the world. Without an eternity and absolutes, life to me seems to be devoid of all real meaning. I can’t accept that. Believing in the absolutes, I find the meaning, and the hope.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with nearly 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
By Tony Hanmer